Donald Trump needs the electorate to know that he has a plan for his eventual second term. It’s not a clever plan, and he’s entirely self-interested, but it’s still a plan.
On Tuesday, Trump shared a word cloud on his Truth Social account, offering little explanation about its origin and meaning. The graphic, a throwback to early-2010s internet obsessions, featured words such as “revenge,” “dictatorship,” and “corruption” floating prominently in the center of the blob.
That word cloud grew out of a Daily Mail article published Tuesday, in which voters were asked to describe how they felt about the potential second term of Trump and President Joe Biden, who are expected to face off in 2024 as their party’s nominees. To the president, it might seem so. The Mail then generated word clouds to show which single-word descriptors ranked most prominently in their readers’ responses.
The word maximum is used to describe Trump’s return to the White House as “revenge. “The word maximum is used to describe what can be expected from a time when Biden says “nothing. “
Trump’s release of the word cloud turns out to signify at least some acknowledgment that interviewees guessed his intentions. There is no doubt that he has done everything possible to make the electorate perceive exactly what his return to force will look like: the first The president has made it clear that, if re-elected, his second term will focus on taking revenge on the people. He feels like he’s been wronged.
Trump has explicitly stated that his 2024 crusade is aimed at “retribution. “And he has left little in mind when it comes to his plans to rule with an iron fist, having recently made it a fetish to design his rhetoric after that of Adolf Hitler.
On Tuesday, election researcher and fortune teller Kristin Soltis Anderson warned that Trump’s good fortune in 2024 would depend in large part on his ability to present himself as the most practical and robust option for “an electorate that happens to crave more skills” than chaos. The fact that Trump is constantly touting his own bigoted retaliation plans suggests it will be a tall order.
According to Politico, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz is preparing his party for a confusing number one season in 2024 by offering his help to a giant number of applicants who are not subsidized by the Republican establishment. All of his favorite applicants have one thing in common: However, they are running against other people who were endorsed by former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Gaetz and McCarthy have been at odds since the latter won the speaker gavel in 2022. Since then, it turns out that Gaetz has made it his sole project to make McCarthy’s life as unpleasant as possible. Things came to a head in October when Gaetz controlled McCarthy’s ouster as speaker, plunging the House and Republican Party into chaos.
So far, Gaetz has endorsed 3 applicants: J. R. Majewski in Ohio, Elizabeth Helgelien in Nevada, and Darren Bailey in Illinois. He denied Politico that he endorsed those 3 applicants just because they were running against McCarthy’s other favorite people; Not a blow to his colleague.
“It’s old news. He’s now Mike Johnson’s spokesman,” Gaetz said in an article Tuesday.
But it’s unclear what Gaetz’s endgame is other than being a thorn in McCarthy’s side until the very end. McCarthy is retiring from politics on December 31, after his humiliating ouster and a lackluster time as speaker. There’s no guarantee of how much national influence his support holds, but his endorsements have mainly fallen along establishment Republican lines.
But by supporting other applicants, Gaetz may simply force the GOP into a confusing season of hard-fought primaries, in which the party will be allowed to provide a united front. Moreover, Gaetz’s favorites are all candidates who don’t have much chance of winning in the general election. Majewski and Bailey, in fact, have already recorded electoral defeats to their Democratic opponents.
Bailey ran for Illinois governor in 2022. He was defeated by Democrat J.B. Pritzker, who had an easy time tagging the Republican as too extreme. Majewski ran for Ohio representative in 2022 but ended up getting hit on two fronts. The victor, Democrat Marc Kaptur, ran a successful series of ads that branded him as an “extremist” for being on the Capitol grounds during the January 6 attack.
In addition to his best friend, an Associated Press investigation found that Majewski had widely misrepresented his military career. Majewski, an Air Force veteran, said he was sent to Afghanistan after 9/11, where he endured harrowing conditions. Instead, he spent six months loading planes at an air base in Qatar, America’s best friend away from the main conflict.
Gaetz’s propensity to hinder the works of the Republican Party is unlikely to do him any favors in his own career. He’s already incredibly unpopular in his district, and Republican lawmakers are frustrated with him for organizing McCarthy’s ouster. He didn’t hesitate to attract attention and didn’t hesitate when asked what they thought of him.
“Matt Gaetz is frankly a vile person,” Rep. Mike Lawler said in October. “He’s not someone who’s willing to work in a team. He’s got status there, he’s in the stands, he’s lying directly to the people.
Still, Gaetz will have a chance to prove he has some advantages in an election year, despite a career largely faithful to trolling his own colleagues.
He makes a list. He double-checks. He posts it on Truth Social. Donald Trump ranted to us for several days about all his enemies and received snubs on social media for Christmas.
Trump’s speech, which took a stand on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, highlighted the former president’s growing anger over how he feels wronged, as well as the danger of a second Trump presidency. He targeted President Joe Biden and Special Counsel Jack Smith and spewed lies about the 2020 election for a smart move.
“2024 WILL BE THE YEAR OF A BROAD AND FULLY COORDINATED ROUND OF ILLEGAL ELECTORAL INTERFERENCE through CROOKED JOE BIDEN, THE WORST AND MOST CORRUPT PRESIDENT IN US HISTORY, THE DOJ, THE FBI, THE AG AND THE DA. THROUGHOUT THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES COUNTRY,” Trump wrote Monday morning. BUT DESPITE EVERYTHING, IN THE END THERE WILL BE A GREAT AND GLORIOUS VICTORY FOR THOSE BRAVE AND BRAVE PATRIOTS WHO WANT TO GIVE BACK TO THEIR PEOPLE. AGAIN, A GREAT AMERICA. MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL !!”
Hours later, Biden, Smith, and the Democratic Party at large are “thugs” who “seek to destroy our once-great America. “
“CAN YOU ROT IN HELL? MERRY CHRISTMAS AGAIN!” wrote Trump.
Some of Trump’s other posts accused the Jan. 6 House Investigative Committee of unethical practices. He also accused Biden of weaponizing the Justice Department (a favorite topic of discussion for Republicans, fraught with irony given the GOP’s plans to reorganize the federal workforce as a retaliatory driving force against its political opponents), spying on Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign, and rigging the 2020 presidential election. No evidence of those claims was discovered.
Trump’s unfiltered comments on social media are emblematic of his current presidential crusade, which is less about policy proposals or a long-term vision than his plans for revenge against those he believes have harmed him. Trump has already explicitly stated that his 2024 crusade is aimed at “retaliation. “
As The New Republic recently reported, the other unsettling facet of Trump’s holiday rhetoric is his newfound love of paraphrasing Adolf Hitler. Recently, Trump seemed determined to draw parallels with the world’s best-known avatar of monomaniacal and retributive politics, a central detail. of his crusader character.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham took a dim view of a recent Colorado Supreme Court ruling that former President Donald Trump was ineligible to run for president in that state, uncovered in an undeniable reading of Article 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Constitution, which prohibits anyone who has violated their constitutional oath from holding office for the long term. The court found that this applied to Trump because of the role he played in fomenting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. to the U. S. Supreme Court to reverse or affirm this ruling.
In its unsigned decision, the court stated, “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.” Graham’s contribution to that public reaction is to assail the Colorado court decision for creating a “chilling” effect—presumably on future would-be despots since it’s not clear who, outside of those determined to have gravely violated the public trust, would be bound by the precedent set by the Colorado decision.
The senator offered his legal opinion on a recent edition of ABC’s This Week. “Donald Trump will eventually be on the ballot in Colorado,” Graham said. “I think he will win the primary, he’s got a lot of good choices in the Republican Party, but this ruling in Colorado is chilling to me and it would set up a politicization of the presidential races. It would be bad for the country.”
As Matt Ford of The New Republic wrote last week, the resolution’s leading critics have “ignored the question of whether the resolution is legally sound and have gone straight to the question of whether it is a politically intelligent concept,” providing little more than flimsy reasoning along the way. (Graham’s most attractive contribution to this frame of pictures is his fear that the “presidential races” are “politicized. “):
Although written in an Old English style, the meaning is quite undeniable when broken down into its constituent components. Generally speaking, if someone held federal or state office and took an oath to uphold the Constitution, and then participated in an insurrection or rebellion, they are definitely not eligible to hold long-term federal or state jobs. The only one is a law of Congress; Lawmakers passed one in 1872 to overturn the disqualification of former Confederates in an attempt at national reconciliation.
If Graham is sincerely worried about the “chilling” effect that the ruling may have on future political candidates, he should take heart. “Section 3 has only come up in a few fleeting instances since the Civil War,” writes Ford. Indeed, in the rich history of American presidents and presidential candidates, only one figure—Donald Trump—seems to have run afoul of the Constitution in this manner. Moreover, the Republican Party seems to have several people running for president right this very minute who qualify for Colorado’s ballot and who needn’t worry about this court ruling. It would seem, in a final analysis, that the “one neat trick” to avoid the predicament in which Donald Trump has found himself is to simply not foment an insurrection.
Free speech advocates criticize a police officer who goes to a Massachusetts school to pick up a single book.
On Dec. 8, an anonymous person contacted the Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Police Department to complain that an officer had sent an obscene e-book being given to eighth-graders at W. E. B.
The book in question is Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe. The memoir does contain sexually explicit illustrations and language, but more importantly, it discusses the writer’s confusion about and understanding of gender.
Police alerted the school district’s superintendent and Du Bois’ principal, but no one notified the instructor accused of possessing the e-book. The director escorted the police officer to the English instructor’s hall of elegance after the elegance was over, taking the instructor by surprise. The e-book is nowhere to be found.
The American Civil Liberties Union condemned a police officer’s sending for a book. The organization said it had no recollection of this happening before.
“That’s partly what is so concerning,” Ruth A. Bourquin, the senior and managing attorney for the ACLU of Massachusetts, told The Berkshire Eagle. “Police going into schools and searching for books is the sort of thing you hear about in communist China and Russia. What are we doing?”
Justin Silverman, the executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, was worried that this won’t be the last time the police are asked to get involved in school literature. “While it might be rare now, it doesn’t mean that it will be rare in the future,” he said.
More than 100 academics and professors in the state went on strike last Friday to protest police involvement in the incident. Some scholars said they suspected the bigger challenge was the book’s LGBTQ themes, not the sexual imagery.
Gender Queer is sometimes recommended from the age of 14, but it is based on the adult age of each reader. The person who attracted him in his elegance remained anonymous, but was the first to write about the research on social media.
She noted that she has many years of experience as an English teacher. “How on earth is a cop more qualified to decide what books are OK to be in an educational setting for teens?” she wrote.
The Du Bois school librarian, Jennifer Guerin, pointed out that the point of having such a book around is “not about forcing a book into students’ hands” but making sure that such a resource is accessible.
“It’s about the freedom to read,” he said. It’s about offering voluntary access to a well-written and much-appreciated resource in a position for a young person who may want it or want it. “
Rudy Giuliani filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, faced with insurmountable debt after he was found liable for defaming two Georgia state election workers.
The bankruptcy filing shows Giuliani owes up to $500 million in debt, but only has $10 million in assets. The documents also come with a list of other people Giuliani owes cash.
The man once affectionately known as “America’s mayor” owes money to multiple law firms for unpaid legal fees. Several of Giuliani’s former lawyers, including his longtime attorney Robert Costello, have sued Giuliani for failing to pay their legal fees.
Giuliani also owes cash to an accounting firm after failing to pay them in his last divorce. Giuliani’s ex-wife says she owes him more than $260,000 for country club memberships, condo fees and physical care as part of her divorce settlement, but it is not discussed in the bankruptcy filing.
Electronic voting machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion are listed, though. Giuliani helped spread lies in the wake of the 2020 elections that the companies’ voting machines were used to rig the election results.
In addition, Giuliani owes money to Eric Coomer, a Dominion worker. A right-wing conspiracy claims Coomer participated in an “antifa convention” before the 2020 election, in which he said he “made sure” Donald Trump won. .
Giuliani owes money to Daniel Gill, a guy who accused him of assault after attacking Giuliani last year at a Staten Island grocery store, patted him on the back and said, “What’s up, you bastard?The charges against Gill were eventually dropped, and he later sued Giuliani for making baseless allegations against him.
Another of Giuliani’s indexed creditors is Noelle Dunphy, one of his former associates. Dunphy sued Giuliani in May, accusing him of promising to pay her a $1 million annual salary and sexually harassing and abusing her for two years.
Although the filing only claims that this is a “trial” and does not provide additional details, Biden sued Giuliani in September for allegedly attempting to hack into his laptop.
And, of course, Giuliani owes money to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the two election agents. Giuliani was convicted in August of defaming women, after accusing the two men of ballot tampering in Georgia’s 2020 election. The women were subjected to months of harassment and death threats.
A ruling handed down Friday ordered Giuliani to pay Freeman and Moss $148 million in damages. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back and led Giuliani to declare bankruptcy. But he’s been struggling to make money for a while.
Giuliani listed his Manhattan apartment for sale in July and began representing himself in court to save on legal fees. In August, after he was indicted in Georgia, Giuliani asked his social media followers to donate to his defense fund.
He also went to Mar-a-Lago to beg Trump to pay him to work as Trump’s private attorney. It didn’t work out, but Trump agreed to host a fundraising dinner for Giuliani. Admission costs $100,000 per plate.
A Colorado court’s ruling to remove Donald Trump from the Republican No. 1 spot in 2024 may have far-reaching implications across the country.
On Thursday, California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis called on the secretary of state to “explore all legal features to exclude former President Donald Trump from California’s number one 2024 election,” setting the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling as a precedent.
“This decision is about honoring the rule of law in our country and protecting the fundamental pillars of our democracy,” Kounalakis wrote in the letter. “California must stand on the right side of history. California is obligated to determine if Trump is ineligible for the California ballot.”
“There will inevitably be political debates around the resolution to remove Trump from the ballot, but it’s not a matter of political play. This is a disastrous factor that puts at stake the sanctity of our charter and our democracy,” he concluded.
Kounalakis’s call will likely incense some of the state’s voters, more than 34 percent of whom supported Trump in the last presidential election. Still, California could soon become a part of a growing movement of states that have formally tried to kick Trump’s name out of their voting booths, including Arizona, Rhode Island, Michigan, Maine, and Minnesota. The GOP front-runner’s hold at the top of the primary ballot is also facing legal challenges in more than a dozen states, including Alaska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Vermont, and Virginia.
The Colorado court’s 3–4 ruling dually determined that Trump participated in insurrection on January 6, 2021, and that his bid for the Oval Office violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, which bans insurrectionists from holding public office.
And while Colorado’s ruling is the first of its kind, its challenge will also likely face an appeal to the conservative-majority U. S. Supreme Court, made up of three Trump-appointed justices. This will position the country’s court as an even more integral component of the 2024 presidential election than it was already willing to do following the resolution to hear several high-profile cases on reproductive rights.
Republicans, meanwhile, have wavered at the nation’s pivot to their favorite, criticizing the state’s decisions to make a decision for themselves on what they consider constitutional, despite their classic party-like-states-rights philosophy.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has accused President Joe Biden of treason, just hours after she herself appeared to have committed sedition.
Greene first raised the allegation during a Tuesday podcast interview, when she said Republicans should expand their Biden impeachment efforts to include undocumented immigration.
“I’m starting to think that impeachment is rarely enough. I think those other people need to be held accountable for their betrayal of what’s happening at our southern border,” Greene said.
Treason is explained as “the betrayal of one’s own country by attempting to overthrow the government, wage war against the state, or materially aid enemies. “Allowing immigrants to cross the border does not seem acceptable.
However, Greene doubled down on her treason rate on Wednesday, writing on X (formerly Twitter): “Joe Biden is guilty of treason and the Democratic Party has opened a door it NEVER opened. “
“They are forced to live by their own rules,” he wrote.
Except that the leg on which he stands was weakened by the fact that, six hours earlier, Greene had filed for a “national divorce” in X.
The United States is in a constitutional crisis. The government is allowing a full-scale border invasion and harboring illegal immigrants. The courts are engaging in judicial tyranny. The government is used politically as a weapon of opposition to the people. Soon, national divorce would possibly be our only option.
This is the first time Greene has filed for a national divorce. He first unleashed far-right rhetoric in February, saying the U. S. needed to “break up into red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. “
A few days later, he went even further. During an interview on Fox News, Greene claimed that the U. S. was headed for civil war.
Two Republican leaders remained notably silent on Tuesday’s resolution passed by the Colorado Supreme Court to keep Donald Trump off the 2024 ballot.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. John Thune, the No. 2 Republican in the upper chamber, didn’t say a word about the state’s landmark court ruling that would well save the GOP front-runner from winning a single vote in Colorado. based on the fact that Trump violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution when he filed one on January 6, 2021.
The pair’s silence suggests that the Republican anti-Trumpers foresee a better Republican Party without the wannabe despot, who is currently leading the GOP primaries by more than 50 points above his runner-up, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, according to aggregated polling data by FiveThirtyEight.
When the Senate voted to acquit Trump of his impeachment charges, McConnell agreed to do so only on technical grounds, arguing that Trump was already gone when they were discussing his merits in the Senate in February 2021.
“There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day,” McConnell said at the time.
Meanwhile, Thune argued that when Trump wins, Republicans lose.
But others have taken note of the recent silence of the two men, Trump’s family.
“Mitch McConnell, John Thune and John Cornyn remain silent. Of the top four prominent members of the Senate Republican leadership, Barrasso is the one who has the courage to stand up to what the radical left seeks to do to my father,” Donald said. Trump Jr. wrote in X, referring to the Senate Republican conference.
The Colorado court’s ruling is the first in US history to exclude a candidate, even a presidential candidate, from the ballot. Its ruling now puts immense pressure on the federal Supreme Court, which, after taking up several high-profile abortion cases, is already poised to play a pivotal role in the 2024 election cycle.
Still, Colorado’s ruling may also prove hugely influential among courts and election officials contemplating similar measures in other states, reducing Trump’s ability to secure a majority in the first place.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham has started a wild new conspiracy about why Donald Trump is facing so many legal trials.
In a Wednesday night segment, Ingraham addressed Trump’s disqualification from the Colorado presidential election, his claims of fraud and attempted overturning the 2020 election, and his recent comments paraphrasing Adolf Hitler.
“Given what we are seeing in the courts, at the DOJ, and even in state AG offices, and given Democrats’ ‘Trump is Hitler’ rhetoric—is it not logical, at least to consider, maybe even to assume, that some on the left are hoping to spark some type of civil unrest here?” Ingraham said.
“Which would follow, of course, a major crackdown on civil liberties or the declaration of a national emergency?All this as a way – a protective way – to inaugurate, I don’t know, postal voting on a national scale. ?
WOW wait till you hear this one.. pic.twitter.com/4Q7T1FtRvz
Ingraham is the latest Trump supporter to insist on the lifestyles of some kind of deep state conspiracy that opposes him. In reality, Trump has vowed to be a “dictator” from day one of his presidency if re-elected. How does this constitute a “massive crackdown on civil liberties”?
Ingraham’s comments are very similar to those of his former colleague Tucker Carlson, who, despite privately admitting that he hates Trump “passionately,” has never missed an opportunity to scare on Trump’s behalf.
In addition, Carlson, Trump, and many others in the former president’s inner circle have attempted to stir up civil unrest to achieve their goals.